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Formerly, a public man needed a private secretary for a barrier between himself and the public. Nowadays he has a press secretary, to keep him properly in the public eye.

Daniel J. Boorstin

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Daniel J. Boorstin
Age: 89 †
Born: 1914
Born: October 1
Died: 2004
Died: February 28
Biographer
Historian
Lawyer
Librarian
Philosopher
Sociologist
Writer
Atlanta
Georgia
Private
Barrier
Needed
Publicity
Public
Nowadays
Eye
Secretary
Keep
Barriers
Men
Properly
Presses
Press
Formerly

More quotes by Daniel J. Boorstin

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We read advertisements... to discover and enlarge our desires.
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A wonderful thing about a book, in contrast to a computer screen, is that you can take it to bed with you.
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Knowledge is not simply another commodity. On the contrary. Knowledge is never used up. It increases by diffusion and grows by dispersion.
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When I was living in England I found that the more I lived abroad, the more American I discovered I was.
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The modern American tourist now fills his experience with pseudo-events. He has come to expect both more strangeness and more familiarity than the world naturally offers. He has come to believe that he can have a lifetime of adventure in two weeks and all the thrills of risking his life without any real risk at all.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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The force of the advertising word and image dwarfs the power of other literature in the 20th century.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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The fog of information can drive out knowledge.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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The history of Western science confirms the aphorism that the great menace to progress is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.
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We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in their place.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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Historians will not fail to note that a people who could spend $300 billion on defense refused to spend a tiny fraction of that total to keep their libraries open in the evening.
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But rather that we should lose our sense that neither can become the other, that the traditional novel form continues to enlarge our experience in those very areas where the wide-angle lense and the Cinerama screen tend to narrow it.
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Being known primarily for their well-knownness, celebrities intensify their celebrity images simply by becoming widely known for relations among themselves. By a kind of symbiosis, celebrities live off one another.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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It is only a short step from exaggerating what we can find in the world to exaggerating our power to remake the world. Expecting more novelty than there is, more greatness than there is, and more strangeness than there is, we imagine ourselves masters of a plastic universe. But a world we can shape to our will is a shapeless world.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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Not so many years ago there was no simpler or more intelligible notion than that of going on a journey. Travel -movement through space -provided the universal metaphor for change. One of the subtle confusions -perhaps one of the secret terrors -of modern life is that we have lost this refuge. No longer do we move through space as we once did.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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Where ruts have not yet been worn, it requires less effort to stay out of them.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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As you make your bed, so you must lie in it.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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The Republic of Technology where we will be living is a feedback world.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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. . . the messiness of experience, that may be what we mean by life.
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The mind is a vagrant thing.... Thinking is not analogous to a person working in a laboratory who invents something on company time.
Daniel J. Boorstin
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The problem for us is less to discover the way it really is than to see the meaning of the way.
Daniel J. Boorstin